Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

David Lean | Blithe Spirit

between wives

by douglas messerli

David
Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan (screenplay, based on the play
by Noël Coward), David Lean (director) Blithe
Spirit / 1945

I have watched
David Lean’s cinematic remake of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit numerous times over the years (we own a copy of the
film), and, admittedly, have enjoyed it. Coward’s wit, particularly in some of
his songs, has always impressed me, even if I’ve primarily felt that his plays,
dramas, comedies, and musicals lacked great depth of meaning. Like the absurd
“plot” of this sometimes silly “ghost story,” Coward’s best work exists on the
surface, in the witty chit-chat of his mostly housebound figures. Even when his
actors traveled the ocean as in Sail
Away! they unwillingly wandered and wondered, as did his hero Mimi Paragon
(played by Elaine Stritch), “Why do the wrong people, travel, travel, travel?”
Dressed in silk bathrobe, a cigarette dangling from a long silver holder, both
Coward and his characters, creatures, indentured to domesticity like the
temporarily roving housewife of Brief Encounter, who were intended to
stay put.

Perhaps that explains, in part, Coward’s
dislike of Lean’s film rendition of his stage play. Lean dared to take the
camera out of the Condomine’s comfy mansion, showing the car careening around
dangerous corners through the Folkestone streets, for little purpose, one must
admit, except to let the characters, for short periods, out of the house, as if
walking the dogs. Cinematically, it has little effect; only Madame Arcati’s
(Margaret Rutherford) boisterous bicycle ride seems to be a truly energizing
event.

Although critics praised the film’s
Technicolor cinematography and Visual Effects specialist Tom Howard won an
Academy Award, for me the specially “lit” appearance of the always
green-skinned former wife and current poltergeist Elvira Condomine (Kay
Hammond) slightly sickens my stomach every time I see it. If her husband
Charles (Rex Harrison), the only one that can see her, describes her to his
current wife, Ruth (Consntance Cummings) as having been good-looking, it’s hard
to see why the troublesome house guest was brought into manifestation by
more-than-eccentric Arcati for any purpose but to be a wise-cracking ghoul, who
slithers up to the unsuspecting living only to blow air into their ears or to
examine their “bad taste” in close-up disdain. Elvira may, at times, be quite
hilarious in her observations—for example, when her odd-behaving husband
seemingly begins to talk himself, Ruth demanding that he come up to bed, Elvira
responds “The way that woman harps on bed.”—but, after a while, she becomes
more of a bore.

Not that Charles minds it much.
Clearly, he (like Harrison in real life if we are to
believe to tell-all autobiographies and the tabloids) saw women less as serious
companions than as entertaining diversions, amusing distractions to have around
the house. Somewhat similarly to Coward’s play Design for Living, at times Blithe
Spirit suggests that if one lover is fun, two are even better—if only the two of them could get on
better. Much of the fun of Coward’s play, accordingly, comes from the
double-talking of Charles as he abusively responds to his invisible wife,
language misinterpreted as being directed at Ruth. Of course, he has also been
abusing her, we soon perceive, living in a world in which he has been doted on
by women throughout most of his life (again not so very different, if we are to
believe Lilli Palmer, from the actor’s legendary relationships with the
opposite sex, two of whose wives committed suicide). It is predictable,
finally, that the two women—once Ruth is accidentally killed off in a car
accident Elvira has intended for Charles—should join forces to find a way to
“leave” their husband or, finally, to oust him from his own house

The sleep-inducing incantations by Madame
Arcati to exorcise these spirits from human-like manifestations are not as
significant to the play as the fact that they give an opportunity to show
Margaret Rutherford huffing, puffing, skipping, jumping, and exercising her
marvelously rubber-like face. In fact, this movie—which originally did not do
well on either side of the Atlantic—is nearly entirely dependent on the
shenanigans of Arcati, who transforms eccentric behavior in an absolute art
form. At the ripe age of 53 Rutherford seems far more spry than her wonderfully
dotty later performances as Miss Prism and Jane Marple. She is the one and only
reason one has to see this film!

Lean, meanwhile, seems not to comprehend
Charles’ absolute delight that he now has the chance, at the end of this
misogynistic and spiritually empty tale to rid himself of both his now
malicious ex’s. In the original play, Charles—on the advice of Madame
Arcati—speedily leaves his home on his way to lone and long ocean voyage with
his favorite sailing partner.

To be fair to Charles, neither if his
wives has proven to be a very loving woman: Ruth, unable to deal with her
husband’s perplexity, turns spiteful and mean, displaying her selfishness most
openly in her impatient dismissal of Madame Arcati. Elvira gradually reveals an
unsavory past with other men that, given the period, might, one imagines, have
led the film to be cut by the English censors (Charles’ line “If you’re trying
to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that
you’ve omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a
complete list after lunch,” did meet
with the British censor’s threats). The couple’s evidently torrid sexual past
may have been seen as somewhat predictable for gay relationships, such as those
experienced by Coward, but would have been quite shocking for heterosexual
couples in its day; one need only recall how reprehensible Maxim de Winter
finds his wife Rebecca to be after her confession in Hitchcock’s film of only
five years earlier, that she had been sexually active before their marriage:
his reaction almost justifies her “murder.”Accordingly, to have Charles’ wives seek their comeuppance, as Lean
does, by killinghim off so that he
might eternally be forced to sit between their incriminating cackles, quite
misses the point of Coward’s somewhat metaphorical depiction of divorce, with
the women (presumably in bilitis-like harmony) keeping the house, while the
male is released into the rainy night! I suppose, what with Lean’s and
Harrison’s propensity to marry—each had six marriages before they died—both
director and actor sought an alternative ending wherein they could continue to
be the center of female obeisance.